Christmas 'Messiah' isn't what it seems / Composed for Lent it celebrates the ruin of Jerusalem

Michael Marissen, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, April 8, 2007

A "Messiah Sing-In" -- a performance of Handel's oratorio "Messiah" with the audience joining in the choruses -- is a musical highlight of the Christmas season. Christians, Jews and others come together to delight in one of the consummate masterpieces of Western music.

The high point is the "Hallelujah" chorus, familiar from its use in strange surroundings, from Mel Brooks' "History of the World, Part 1," where it signified the origins of music among cavemen, to television advertising for all-terrain vehicles.

So "Messiah" lovers may be surprised to learn that the work was meant not for Christmas but for Lent, and that the "Hallelujah" chorus was designed not to honor the birth or resurrection of Jesus but to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in A.D. 70. For most Christians in Handel's day, this horrible event was construed as divine retribution on Judaism for its failure to accept Jesus as God's promised messiah.

While Handel scholars and enthusiasts say that significant numbers of Jews attended the original performances of Handel's oratorios, they offer no compelling evidence. Most Jews in 18th century London were too poor to attend such concerts, and observant Jews would in any event have balked at the public use of the sacred, unutterable name of God in the oratorios, even though "Jehovah" was a Christian misunderstanding of the prohibited name.

Handelians often assert that the composer's practice of writing oratorios on ancient Israelite subjects (like "Israel in Egypt" and "Judas Maccabaeus") is pro-Jewish. Handel and his contemporaries did have a high opinion of the characters populating the Hebrew Bible, not as "Jews" but as proto-Christian believers in God's expected messiah, Jesus.

But what about their stance toward living Jews and toward Judaism after the advent of Jesus? Relevant contemporary British sources have virtually nothing positive to say on that subject and very little that is even neutral.

To create the "Messiah" libretto Charles Jennens, a formidable scholar and a friend of Handel's, compiled a series of scriptural passages adapted from the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. A traditionalist Christian, Jennens was troubled by the spread of deism, the notion that God had simply created the cosmos and let it run its course without divine intervention. Christianity rests on the belief that God broke into history by taking human form in Jesus. For Jennens and others, deism represented a menace.

Deists argued that Jesus was neither the son of God nor the messiah. Since Christian writers had considered Jews the most grievous enemies of their religion, they came to suppose that deists obtained anti-Christian ammunition from rabbinical scholars. The Anglican bishop Richard Kidder, for example, claimed in his monumental 1690s treatise on Jesus as the messiah that "the deists among us, who would run down our revealed religion, are but underworkmen to the Jews."

Kidder's title says it all: "A Demonstration of the Messias, In Which the Truth of the Christian Religion Is Proved, Against All the Enemies Thereof; but Especially Against the Jews." Jennens owned an edition from 1726, and he appears to have studied it carefully. Kidder's work reads like a blueprint for "Messiah."

Central to Kidder and his like-minded readers is a mode of interpretation called "typology," which means that events in the Old Testament point to events in Christian history not only through explicit prophecy and fulfillment but also through the more mysterious implied spiritual anticipation of Christian "antitypes" in Old Testament "types."

At Romans 5:14, for example, the Apostle Paul describes Adam as a "type" of "the one to come" (Jesus, the antitype).

Such thinking was the driving force behind Kidder's book and Jennens' choice and juxtaposition of texts in his libretto. In "Messiah" Old and New Testament selections stand fundamentally in a typological alignment.

Jennens had the discernment to see that he couldn't thwart his adversaries simply by producing reading matter insisting that biblical texts be understood both typologically and as Jesus-centered. Like Arius, who won popular opinion for his views with catchy anti-orthodox jingles in the fourth century, Jennens resorted to music, approaching Handel with his libretto.

What better means to comfort disquieted Christians against the faith-busting wiles of deists and Jews than to draw on the feelings and emotions of art over and above the reasons and revelations of argument?

"Messiah" does exactly this, culminating in the "Hallelujah" chorus. At Scene 6 in Part 2 the oratorio features passages from Psalm 2 of the Old Testament set as a series of antagonistic movements that precede excerpts from the New Testament's Book of Revelation set as the triumphant "Hallelujah" chorus: type and antitype, prophecy and fulfillment.

The bass aria that opens Scene 6 asks, "Why do the nations so furiously rage together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing?" But in the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, the passage, Psalm 2:1, reads not "nations" but "heathen." Why the difference, and where does it come from?

Jennens took his reading from Henry Hammond, the great 17th century Anglican biblical scholar, whose extended and fiercely erudite commentary on Psalm 2 suggests the advantage of "nations" over "heathen": "Nations" can readily include the Jews. In the 18th century no one would have uncritically used the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer's word "heathen" for Jews or Judaism. Even children would have known this, from the famous hymn writer Isaac Watts' wildly popular "Divine Songs for the Use of Children," which includes the verse "Lord, I ascribe it to thy Grace, /And not to Chance, as others do, /That I was born of Christian race, /And not a Heathen or a Jew."

Handel sets Psalm 2:1 as an aria drawing on the stile concitato (agitated style), with repeated 16th notes as a convention for violent affects to underline the raging of the nations, pointedly including the Jews. "The people," when they "imagine a vain thing," are further associated with a conspicuous violin line of oscillating pitches.

A similar melodic idea depicts the Jews in the earlier recitative "All they that see him laugh him to scorn; they shoot out their lips, and shake their heads." The recitative sets Psalm 22:7, a text that can be understood (typologically) to foreshadow a New Testament passage, Matthew 27:39-40, which refers to Jewish pilgrims attending Passover and Jesus on the cross: "They that passed by, reviled him, wagging their heads." The oscillating pattern and its scornful tone capture the Jews' rejection of Jesus as the messiah.

In Scene 6, at the tenor aria, Jennens skips to Psalm 2:9, "Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron." His excision of verses 5 through 8 makes the violent language in "Thou shalt break them" refer to the Jesus-rejecting Jews, because without the intervening verses, "them" refers to "the nations" (including the Jews) and "the people" (the Jews) of the bass aria, rather than the gentiles referred to in the missing Verse 8.

If Jews make up "them," who is the "thou"? Jesus, as John Newton explains in his 1786 book "Messiah: Fifty Sermons on the Celebrated Oratorio of Handel": The resurrected Jesus, sitting at the right hand of God, unleashed his anger on the Jews by having the Roman armies lay waste to Jerusalem and its temple in A.D. 70.

Newton is best known today as the author of the hymn "Amazing Grace," and he is a central figure in the film of that name now in theaters, in which he is portrayed as repenting his devotion to the slave trade in the 1780s. But his grace apparently wasn't amazing enough to curb the constant affirmation of anti-Jewish sentiment in his "Messiah" sermons.

Here he comments, "The music to which Psalm 2:9 is set is so well adapted to the idea that it expresses, as, in a manner, to startle those who hear it." In Jennens' and Handel's time, Christians were all but unanimous in believing that the violence depicted in Psalm 2:9 represented the prophesying type for a later event: the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, the fulfilling antitype. So when Jennens has brought in Psalm 2 and its understood prophecy of the destruction of the temple, widely understood as signaling God's rejection of Judaism, what is the response? "Hallelujah! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth; the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ" (Revelation 19:6, 19:16 and 11:5).

Jennens undoubtedly got the idea of juxtaposing these passages directly from Hammond, who wrote: "Now at Revelation 11 is fulfilled that prophecy of Psalm 2. The Jewish nation have behaved themselves most stubbornly against Christ, and cruelly against Christians, and God's judgments are come upon them." This is surely how listeners would have understood the combination of these texts in 18th century Britain.

Handel's music makes its own contribution to the troubling theological message here. The mood of the "Hallelujah" chorus is over-the-top triumph.

For the first time in "Messiah" trumpets and drums are used together, although they would have been appropriate or welcome at several earlier places. In Baroque music trumpets with drums were emblems of great power and of victory. In "Messiah" the combination is saved for celebrating the destruction of Jesus' crucifixion-provoking "enemies" prefigured in Psalm 2.

With Old Israel supposedly rejected by God and its obsolescence long before ensured, why did 18th century writers and composers rejoice against Judaism at all, whether explicitly or, as here, implicitly? There must have been some festering Christian anxiety about the prolonged survival of Judaism: How could a "false" religion last so long? Might Judaism somehow actually be "true"?

These issues were a matter of life and death, says Jennens' key guide, Kidder's tome: "If we be wrong in dispute with the Jews, we err fundamentally, and must never hope for salvation. So that either we or the Jews must be in a state of damnation. Of such great importance are those matters in dispute between us and them."

This would represent ample motivation for the text and musical setting of "Messiah" to engage these issues and would perhaps help explain any lapse from decent Christian gratitude into unseemly rejoicing in the "Hallelujah" chorus.

While still a timely, living masterpiece that may continue to bring spiritual and aesthetic sustenance to many music lovers, Christian or otherwise, "Messiah" also appears to be very much a work of its own era. Listeners might do well to ponder exactly what it means when, in keeping with tradition, they stand during the "Hallelujah" chorus.